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 PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
THE HISTORY
OF CHILDHOOD

DEATH, EMOTION AND CHILDHOOD

IN PREMODERN EUROPE
EDITED BY KATIE BARCLAY AND KIMBERLEY
REYNOLDS WITH CIARA RAWNSLEY
Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood

Series Editors
Laurence Brockliss
Magdalen College
Oxford, UK

George Rousseau
Oxford University
Oxford, UK
Aim of series
Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood is the first of its kind
to historicise childhood in the English-speaking world; at present no
historical series on children/ childhood exists, despite burgeoning areas
within Child Studies. The series aims to act both as a forum for publishing
works in the history of childhood and a mechanism for consolidating the
identity and attraction of the new discipline.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14586
 Katie Barclay • Kimberley Reynolds • Ciara Rawnsley
Editors

Death, Emotion and

Childhood in
Premodern Europe
Editors
Katie Barclay Kimberley Reynolds
Australian Research Council School of English Literature,
Centre for the History of Emotions Language and Linguistics,
University of Adelaide Newcastle University,
Adelaide, Australia Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
Tyne and Wear, UK
Ciara Rawnsley
Australian Research Council
Centre for the History of Emotions
University of Western Australia
Crawley, Australia

Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood

ISBN 978-1-137-57198-4    ISBN 978-1-137-57199-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57199-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955937

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Chapter 5 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license
information in the chapter.
The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover image: Alexander Denton and wife Anne, née Wilson, C. 1566. Denton Tomb,
Hereford Cathedral. Image Copyright Julian P. Guffogg.

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
In memory of Philippa Maddern (1952–2014)
 Acknowledgements

Our thanks to the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for

the History of Emotions at The University of Western Australia for spon-
soring the symposium on which this volume is substantially based and
for the support of many individuals associated with the CHE for their
contributions. Notable among these is Bob White, who was instrumen-
tal in making the symposium happen. Like all academic work, the labour
of a swathe of unseen peer reviewers remains invisible and the editors
would like to thank them for their timely and helpful contributions. We
would particularly like to thank Special Collections, Baillieu Library,
The University of Melbourne for their permission to use the images in
Chap. 11, and Skokloster castle, Jämtlands läns museum Minnesbank,
Östersund and the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, for their permission to
reproduce images in Chap. 6. We also wish to thank Wellcome Trust for
providing funding (grant no. 080643/Z/06/Z/AW/HH) to make Hannah
Newton’s chapter available open access.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction: Small Graves: Histories of Childhood,

Death and Emotion1
Katie Barclay and Kimberley Reynolds

2 ‘he nas but seven yeer olde’: Emotions in Boy Martyr

Legends of Later Medieval England25
Andrew Lynch

3 Rhetorics of Death and Resurrection: Child Death

in Late-Medieval English Miracle Tales45
Philippa Maddern

4 Beholding Suffering and Providing Care: Emotional

Performances on the Death of Poor Children
in Sixteenth-Century French Institutions65
Susan Broomhall

5 ‘Rapt Up with Joy’: Children’s Emotional Responses

to Death in Early Modern England87
Hannah Newton

ix
x Contents

6 Facing Childhood Death in English Protestant

Spirituality109
Alec Ryrie

7 Memorials and Expressions of Mourning: Portraits

of Dead Children in Seventeenth-­Century Sweden129
Karin Sidén

8 Child-Killing and Emotion in Early Modern

England and Wales151
Garthine Walker

9 Grief, Faith and Eighteenth-Century Childhood:

The Doddridges of Northampton173
Katie Barclay

10 Responsibility and Emotions: Parental, Governmental

and Almighty Responses to Infant Deaths in Denmark
in the Mid-Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century191
Anne Løkke

11 Child Death and Children’s Emotions in Early

Sunday School Reward Books209
Merete Colding Smith

12 Childhood Death in Modernity: Fairy Tales,

Psychoanalysis, and the Neglected Significance
of Siblings229
Chantal Bourgault du Coudray

Further Reading 245

Index 253
 Notes on Contributors

Katie Barclay is a Research Fellow in the Australian Research Council

Centre for Excellence in the History of Emotions, University of Adelaide.
She is the author of Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in
Scotland, 1650–1850 (2011), winner of both the Women’s History Network
Book Prize and the Senior Hume Brown Prize for Scottish History. She has
written widely on emotions, family life and childhood, particularly in
Scotland and Ireland. With Deborah Simonton, she edited a collection on
Women in Eighteenth-Century Scotland: Intimate, Intellectual and Public
Lives (2013).
Susan Broomhall is Professor in Early Modern History at The University of
Western Australia. She was a Foundation Chief Investigator in the Australian
Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and now
holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in the Centre. She
researches women and gender in France, the Low Countries and Scotland
from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, on which she has published a
series of monographs. In addition, Broomhall has published a series of essays
analysing charity and the experiences of the poor in sixteenth-century France,
including on women’s experiences as recipients and donors, urban space and
charitable practices, care for foundlings, self-fashioning in pauper requests,
connections between gender, poverty and imprisonment, and the charitable
politics of elite and middling masculinities.
Chantal Bourgault du Coudray teaches gender and cultural studies at
The University of Western Australia. Her most notable publication is The
Curse of the Werewolf: Fantasy, Horror and the Beast Within (2006). She

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

has also written and produced a number of films, notably the feature
drama The Sculptor’s Ritual (2013). Her interest in the cultural connec-
tions between stories, gender, subjectivity and affect also supports a range
of innovative teaching initiatives for which she has received numerous
grants and awards.
Anne Løkke is Professor of Danish Social and Cultural History 1800–1950
with special responsibilities for studying health in history in the Department
of History, Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is the
author of Døden i barndommen 1800–1920 [Death in Infancy 1800–1920]
(1998). She has published widely on the history of infants’ health in
Denmark. She is the founder and leader of the BioHistory Group, whose
members study the historicity of the body and are particularly interested in
how politics, perceptions and knowledge have shaped bodies and bodily
practices.
Andrew Lynch is Professor in English and Cultural Studies at The
University of Western Australia, and Director of the Australian Research
Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. His recent pub-
lications include Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature
(2015), with Stephanie Downes and Katrina O’Loughlin, and Understanding
Emotions in Early Europe (2015), with Michael Champion. He is a con-
tributor to the Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (2016) and The
Middle Ages in the Modern World: Twenty-first-century Perspectives (2017).
Philippa Maddern (1952–2014) was a distinguished medieval historian at
The University of Western Australia, where she became a Professor, senior
administrator and the founding Director of the Australian Research Council
Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. After completing Honours
and an MA at the University of Melbourne, she obtained a D.Phil at Oxford,
subsequently published as Violence and Social Order: East Anglia 1422–1442
(1992). Philippa’s principal research area was later medieval English social
history. As an inspiring teacher, researcher and mentor, she made many sig-
nificant contributions to gender history, history of the family and childhood,
and the history of emotions.
Hannah Newton is a social and cultural historian of early modern England,
specialising in the histories of medicine, emotions, and childhood. Her PhD
thesis formed the basis of a book, The Sick Child in Early Modern England,
1580–1720 (2012), winner of the European Association for the History of
Medicine and Health 2015 Book Prize. In 2011–2014, Hannah undertook
a Wellcome Trust Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, and researched
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

for her second monograph, Misery to Mirth: Recovery from Illness in Early
Modern England (forthcoming). The aim of this book is to rebalance our
picture of early modern health, which hitherto has focused almost exclu-
sively on disease and death. Since 2014, Hannah has been based at the
University of Reading, lecturing in history. Here, she has been granted a
Wellcome Trust University Award (2016–2021) to carry out an investiga-
tion of the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations of the early
modern sickchamber. The goal of this project is to bring us closer to what it
was like to be ill, or to witness the illness of others, in early modern England.
Ciara Rawnsley is an early career researcher who works at the Australian
Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, where
she’s spearheading a project to showcase the history and importance of the
New Fortune Theatre. As well as her work for the Centre, she is a tutor and
lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western
Australia. Her research interests include Shakespeare and the Elizabethan
period; early modern popular culture and drama; and folktales and folklore.
She has published an article in the Journal of Early Modern Studies, a chapter
in the recent book The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in
Early Modern Literature and Culture (2015), and another in Shakespeare
and New Emotionalism (2015).
Kimberley Reynolds is Professor of Children’s Literature in the School
of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University,
UK, and Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the Australian Research
Council Centre for Excellence in the History of Emotions. She specialises
in writing and publishing for children in the late-Victorian/Edwardian
period and early twentieth century and has published extensively across the
field of children’s literature studies. She was awarded the International
Brothers Grimm Prize for her contributions to children’s literature studies
in 2013. Previous books include Representations of Childhood Death, ed.
with Gillian Avery (2000), the work that led to the symposium that inspired
this volume. She recently completed Left Out: The Forgotten Tradition of
Radical Publishing for Children in Britain, 1910–1949 (2016).
Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University
in the UK. He specialises in the history of the Reformation era in England
and Scotland, and his previous books include Being Protestant in Reformation
Britain (2013), The Age of Reformation (2009), The Sorcerer’s Tale (2008),
The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (2006) and The Gospel and Henry
VIII (2003). His book Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

will be published in 2017. His current project uses the history of emotion
to examine religious doubt and scepticism in the seventeenth century.
Karin Sidén is Director General of the art museum Prince Eugens
Waldemarsudde in Stockholm, and Associate Professor at the Department for
Art History at Uppsala University, Sweden. She is the author of Den ideala
barndomen. Studier i det stormaktstida barnporträttets ikonografi och funktion
(Dissertation, Uppsala University, 2001), and ‘The Ideal Childhood. Portraits
of Children in 17th Century Sweden’, in Baroque Dreams: Art and Vision in
Sweden in the Era of Greatness (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Figura Uppsala
Studies in the History of Art, Nova Series 31, Uppsala, 2003). She co-curated
the exhibition Face to Face. Portraits from Five Centuries at the
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (2001), and was curator for the exhibition The
Passions: Art and the Emotions through Five Centuries (Nationalmuseum,
2012). Before taking up her current position in 2012, she was Director of
Research at the Nationalmuseum, where her work focused on the collections
of Dutch and Flemish paintings from the seventeenth century.
Merete Colding Smith is currently an Honorary Fellow at The University
of Melbourne Library in Melbourne, Australia, continuing her research into
early English children’s books and their collectors. A career as a librarian
culminated in the position of Rare Book Curator at the University of
Melbourne. Following early retirement, she was recently awarded a PhD in
History from the University of Melbourne for her thesis, ‘Never Any Work
but All Joy: F.C. and Penelope Morgan and the Morgan Collection of
Children’s Books in the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne, Australia’.
Garthine Walker is Professor of Early Modern History at Cardiff University,
Wales, and a specialist in the histories of gender and of crime from the six-
teenth through eighteenth centuries, and in approaches to historical writing.
Her publications include Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern
England (2003), several edited volumes including Gender and Change:
Agency, Chronology and Periodisation (2009), The Extraordinary and the
Everyday in Early Modern England (2008), and Writing Early Modern
History (2005), and a number of journal articles and book chapters. She
holds a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2013–2016) for a
major project on the history of rape 1500–1800, and is a coinvestigator in a
four-­
year collaborative project, ‘Women Negotiating the Boundaries of
Justice: Britain and Ireland c.1100–c.1750’ with colleagues at the Universities
of Glasgow and Swansea, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council (UK).
 List of Figures

Fig. 7.1 Unknown German painter, Hannibal Gustav Wrangel

(1641–43) on his death bed, c. 1643–45, Oil
on canvas, 78 × 92 cm. Skokloster castle 133
Fig. 7.2 Unknown painter, Epitaph for Gulovia Olai (d. 1637),
1737. Revsunds church, Jämtland 135
Fig. 7.3 Johan Aureller d.ä., Henrik Marhein (1618–67) with sons
and Margareta Gammal with daughters, 1659, Oil on canvas,
200 × 135 cm each, Private possession 138
Fig. 7.4 Johann Weidner, Carl Gustaf Göransson Ulfsparre
(1649–d. 1654), 1654, Oil on canvas, 118 × 74 cm,
Nynäs castle 140
Fig. 7.5 Johann Weidner. Carl Gustaf Göransson Ulfsparre
(1649–d. 1654), 1654, Oil on canvas, 95 × 79 cm,
Nynäs castle 140
Fig. 7.6 Cornelis van der Meulen (1642–91/2), Prince Gustav as dead,
1686, Oil on canvas, 63 × 51 cm, Gripsholm castle, Grh 1363.
Photo © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 143
Fig. 7.7 David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl (1628–98), Allegory
of Prince Ulriks death, 1685, Oil on canvas, 148 × 122 cm.
Gripsholm castle, Grh 1389. Photo © Nationalmuseum,
Stockholm 144
Fig. 11.1 Death bed scene, Janeway’s Token for Children: Being
an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary
Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children
(London: Printed for the Religious Tract
Society, [ca. 1830]), 26 213

xv
xvi List of Figures

Fig. 11.2 Death bed scene, Janeway’s Token for Children:

Being an Exact Account of the Conversion,
Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several
Young Children (London: Printed for the Religious
Tract Society, [ca. 1830]), 34 214
Fig. 11.3 Frontispiece from Legh Richmond, The Young Cottager
(London: Religious Tract Society, [ca. 1840]) 217
Fig. 11.4 Mother and son at the graves of dead siblings, The Little
Graves ([London]: Religious Tract Society, [ca. 1830]), 1 221
Fig. 11.5 Illustration of Little Betsey sweeping, Little Betsey, the
Motherless Girl (London?: Religious Tract Society,
[184–?], p. 3 224
 List of Tables

Table A3.1 Schema of children’s miracle tales within

Grosjean, ed., Henrici VI…Miraculi 57
Table 10.1 Age of death of the offspring of Claus Seidelin, who died
before their father, and the number of lines Claus
Seidelin wrote about the deaths in his memoirs 198

xvii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Small Graves: Histories

of Childhood, Death and Emotion

Katie Barclay with Kimberley Reynolds

In 1677 in Perth, Scotland, James Brown, in his capacity as a town officer,

searched a brewhouse for an infant, whom it was suspected a local woman,
Margaret Black, had given birth to and murdered. In his later testimony to
the court at her trial for infanticide, Brown described how he ‘found her
child in ane bing of small coals and wrapt in a cloak and he […] caused the
pannall wrape the child in a cleaner cloak and […] brought the child to the
tolbuith’.1 His testimony captured an important piece of his evidence, the
discovery of a murdered newborn male child hidden in a pile of coal, but
also, if briefly, Brown’s emotional response to what he uncovered. Perhaps
startling to a modern reader primed to preserve physical evidence for legal
proceedings, when Brown found the body, he insisted that the mother,
who accompanied him, re-dress the baby, removing the dirty and blood-
ied cloth he was wrapped in and replacing it with a new cloak. Brown does

K. Barclay (*)
ARC Centre for the History of Emotion, University of Adelaide,
Adelaide, SA, Australia
e-mail: katie.barclay@adelaide.edu.au
K. Reynolds
School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Tyne and Wear, UK

© The Author(s) 2016 1

K. Barclay et al. (eds.), Death, Emotion and Childhood in
Premodern Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57199-1_1
2 K. BARCLAY AND K. REYNOLDS

not explain his actions here and the surviving depositions do not suggest
that anybody thought this behaviour was remarkable or his motivations
worth recording in the limited space available in a court minute book.
It may be that Brown had encouraged the mother to re-dress the child
to incriminate her. It was commonly held across much of early modern
Europe that a corpse bled when handled by the murderer and this child
seemingly performed to custom, the prosecutor explicitly noting that the
child’s body bled when she picked it up.2 Yet, typically, it was enough for
a murderer to touch an exposed part of the body for this phenomenon to
result. Instead, it appears that Brown’s reaction was driven by his emo-
tional response to finding a dead child and his desire that this infant’s body
receive some semblance of respect and care—a care that should have been
given by the child’s mother and which Brown attempted to force from her
through his demand that she replace the baby’s covering. In not chang-
ing the baby’s wrap himself, Brown may have also been distancing himself
from accusations of paternity or responsibility that caring for a child might
suggest.
While the exact nature of Brown’s emotion cannot be known—did he
feel anger, pain, sadness, horror, a combination of these?—his response is
redolent of the way late seventeenth-century Scottish culture felt about
children and child death. Even illegitimate children who were evidence of
their parents’ ‘wickedness’, as the court described it, were entitled to care
by their mothers.3 And however Brown felt on finding the child, it pro-
voked him to demand that care on the baby’s behalf, indicating the impor-
tance of ensuring care within this community. Prosecutions for infanticide
during the early modern period have been subject to considerable analysis,
yet most of this has focused on the mother’s motivations and treatment.4
The evidence such cases provide for a society’s care for its children has
aroused little comment.5 As the legal proforma that began indictments
for infanticide in seventeenth-century Scotland explained, such convic-
tions were necessary to protect ‘childrene’ from ‘a cruell and barbarous
murder’. Women were required to call for help during their labour, as
without aid ‘a new borne child may be easily stifled or being left exposed
in the condition it comes to the world it must quickly perish’.6 Deaths of
‘innocent infants’ were ‘abhorred & prohibited and punished’ noted the
indictment.7
In Scotland, and possibly much of the rest of Europe where similar
legislation operated, the public were expected to feel strongly about
 INTRODUCTION: SMALL GRAVES 3

infanticide, to ‘abhor’ the occurrence of such crime, and murderers were

to be warned not only of its illegal nature, but of the community’s expected
collective feelings on this subject. ‘Abhor’ in early modern Scots meant to
feel ‘repugnance’ and to ‘shrink back from’, a seemingly visceral emo-
tion of disgust and distancing.8 A focus on ‘innocent babes’ ignored the
social disabilities that faced both mothers and their illegitimate children
in many early modern communities and may have done little to improve
their social position.9 Yet, such language is telling for the special status it
accorded newborn infants, their perceived vulnerability and the need for
society to act together to ensure their survival. Here community emotion
was enjoined by the state to give weight to the criminal indictment and to
invest the public in the care and survival of young children.
How people in Western Europe have historically felt about child death,
particularly the deaths of their own children, has been a topic of lively and
ongoing historical debate for some considerable time. Initial claims by
scholars following in the tradition that rapidly grew up around the work
of Philippe Ariès (1962) suggested that before the eighteenth century, and
perhaps even later, parents displayed low levels of emotion on the death of
their children.10 This was explained by the assumption that a high level of
emotional investment in children during a period of high child mortality
would have been psychologically difficult. Accordingly, people protected
themselves through curbing their feelings. In the years after Ariès’ publica-
tion, historians increasingly disputed these claims. They reread the wide
array of fine art representations of royal and religious children that Ariès
used as evidence for this topic, as well as using new sources, including
literature, personal letters and diaries and court records to name a few,
that displayed the social, economic and emotional investments that par-
ents have had in their children across time. In doing so, they demonstrated
both that parents loved their children and that funerary and commemora-
tion practices marking that love were widespread across time and place.11
Over time, the historiography has become more sophisticated, mov-
ing from simple claims that ‘parents loved’ to recognition that displays of
emotion are informed by culture. Studies of grief, much more than paren-
tal love, have been at the heart of this discussion, as the multiple ways
that people have grieved across time and space have been explored, most
recently influenced by new trends in the history of emotion.12 This has been
accompanied by a wide literature on portrayals of death in various forms of
art and literature, sources that since Ariès have been used to provide useful
4 K. BARCLAY AND K. REYNOLDS

insights into social practice.13 In an early modern European context, con-

siderable discussion has been devoted to the impact of the Reformation
on funerary and mourning practices and how this was refracted differently
across nations.14 Such studies have highlighted the importance of nation-
ality, region, and change over time, as well as marking differences in how
men and women were allowed to express emotion.15
Given the earlier concern with parental grief, how people have responded
to the death of children has been an important theme in certain strands of
this literature, with some variation across national contexts. Regions with
developed historiographies of family life and childhood, such as France,
Germany, the Netherlands, and Britain, have sought to explicate com-
memorations of child death within this context.16 In other areas, where
those historiographies have been slower to develop, interest in child death
has been motivated by particular commemorative practices, such as statu-
ary devoted to children or funeral orations designed for them.17 Accounts
of children dying ‘good deaths’, which were often circulated widely, par-
ticularly in Reformed Europe, have also been scrutinised.18 However, it is
only recently that children’s own responses to death have become a topic
of interest.19
It may appear that there is little left to be said on the relationship
between childhood, death and emotion. However, in the last decade, two
major and interconnected theoretical interventions have rejuvenated this
topic: childhood studies and methodologies from the history of emotion.
Drawing together scholars working at the intersection of these fields, this
volume applies new methodologies to re-examine this discussion and to
finally move forward a field that has implicitly and indeed often explicitly
sat in Ariès’ shadow.20 Whether parents loved their children is no lon-
ger the question. What it means to love opens up a new set of priorities
for the field. Focusing on north-west Europe, this collection highlights
how rethinking the relationship between childhood, death and emotion
through these methodologies turns attention away from families to com-
munities and nations. Children are no longer viewed as the private concern
of individuals, but central to how communities defined themselves, nego-
tiated their relationship with the divine and articulated emotional norms
and values. The relationship between children and death provides a prism
through which the emotional practices of individuals and c­ommunities
can be explicated, and in turn, understanding the workings of emotion
helps to place children in the world.
 INTRODUCTION: SMALL GRAVES 5

Histories of Emotion and Childhood

The history of emotions, as a methodological approach, operates on the
premise that emotion is a social phenomenon, a product of particular histor-
ical moments and cultures. As such, not only how people express feeling, but
what they feel, differs over time and space, allowing emotion to be studied
and explained.21 In many respects, much of the early work on grief has pro-
vided the foundations for a history of emotion to build on, particularly that
which has focused on its cultural dimensions. Yet, much of this early work
has operated on a number of assumptions that are now open to question.
Grief, perhaps more than most emotions, is frequently articulated
in terms of a ‘natural’ or ‘biological’ outpouring that people manage
through cultural forms. Elizabeth Clarke’s otherwise fascinating discus-
sion of seventeenth-century mothers’ writings, published in Avery and
Reynolds (eds), Representations of Childhood Death (2000), situates their
grief as something they learned to control through religious rhetoric, ‘that
voice, which tends to silence the utterance of grief’.22 Similarly, Ralph
Houlbrooke’s (1998) very sensitive rendering of how expressions of grief
and grieving practices evolved over a long early modern period, ultimately
locates grief as fundamentally ahistorical, allowing him to assess the later
sixteenth century as promoting ‘a more compassionate attitude to grief’
than previous eras.23 Grief, particularly of parents, is also associated closely
with love, so that overt outpourings of grief are often uncomplicatedly
used as a measure of affection for the deceased.24 Yet, while most histo-
rians would caution against measuring an absence of evidence of grief as
an absence of love, the relationship between grief and love has not been
explored. Does all loss require love and, if so, what form does such love
take? Does it differ between different people?
Historians of emotion emphasise that it is not only how people express
grief—how they attempt to direct their emotions and their mourning prac-
tices—that is historically specific, but emotion itself. Current, psychoana-
lytically informed understandings of grief as an overwhelming sense of loss
that requires ‘grief work’, as a process of emotion management, overlooks
the extent to which grief—the bodily experience of emotion felt during
periods of loss—is a product of culture, reflected in the e­ xtraordinary range
of grieving practices around the world, from head-hunting in Papua New
Guinea to ritual wailing in premodern Ireland, to stoic resilience in Britain
after the World Wars.25 Grief work itself is recognised as a twentieth-cen-
tury Western construction that is increasingly felt to be outdated among
6 K. BARCLAY AND K. REYNOLDS

psychologists, if not the general public.26 Feeling loss as overwhelming, as

pain or as something that exceeds the self, is as much a product of culture
as the processes that we use to manage those feelings.
This is not to suggest that people can consciously control such emo-
tion, or that emotion does not have a biological dimension, but that
biological processes are not determinative. Unpicking the role of the bio-
logical within emotional processes is, and no doubt will continue to be,
an ongoing topic of debate, yet increasingly scholars, in a wide range of
disciplines, recognise the flexibility of the biological and the ways that the
body adapts and conforms to culture.27 Such plasticity can perhaps be seen
in the ongoing debate on why most people recover from loss and are able
to function ‘normally’ (and why a few do not), despite the variety of ways
that people grieve. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that such
a measure is complicated by the fact that ‘normal’ varies across culture
and that ‘normality’ accounts for the behaviour of those who have been
acculturated through the emotional customs of such communities. Or, in
other words, some cultures may adapt to provide more space for pain (or
other emotions) in everyday life than others. As historians emphasise, grief
responses also change over time, leading to cultural moments where griev-
ing ideals come into conflict, coexist or are transformed. People and even
entire societies can respond to death in ways that surprise themselves, such
as Britain’s outpouring of grief on the death of Diana and the considerable
commentary it caused in the press and among academics as people tried
to explain what happened. A similar outpouring in nineteenth-century
France at the death of Léon Gambetta has been compellingly explicated
by Charles Sowernine as a ritual mechanism for dealing with territorial
loss, and related questions of French identity, and social change after war
with Germany in earlier years.28 Here grieving practices become a mecha-
nism for communities to express, address and create social change.
A cultural emphasis on the production of emotion both creates a more
complex model for understanding the operation of emotion and pro-
vides historians with a methodological opportunity. Emotion is no longer
unknowable and assumed to be identified only in its cultural traces, but
is shown as actively created or performed.29 As such, historical evidence,
whether in private letters and diaries, in literature and pamphlets, in art or
architecture, or in institutional records, can be understood as not only the
fingerprints of emotion, but an active part of how people construct and
perform the emotions they experience.30 Cultural forms are implicated
in the making of emotion, giving shape and meaning to the messiness of
 INTRODUCTION: SMALL GRAVES 7

human experience and, in so doing, impacting on the biological experi-

ence of emotion. In this, emotion becomes a form of practice.31
Viewing historical sources, in all their variety, as a part of the practice of
emotion helps historians to come closer to the emotions of the dead than
has previously been appreciated, not only accessing emotional expression
but its formation. As a methodology, this has required scholars to approach
their sources from a different perspective, and particularly to rethink the
representation/experience distinction in different source forms, yet it is
also an approach that uses the scholarly tools that humanities researchers
have always brought to their work: close attention to the construction of
language and non-linguistic forms of expression, a concern for the mean-
ing of symbols in cultural context and an appreciation for the relatedness
of texts and their interactions.
The relationship between the biological and the cultural is also a ques-
tion at the heart of childhood studies. While the period of life that people
are designated ‘children’, as well as the traits and characteristics associated
with ‘childhood’, are recognised to vary across time and place, the bio-
logical realities that pertain especially to very young children who require
considerable support and educational input to survive and thrive must
also be taken into account.32 Initial claims that medieval and early modern
societies did not recognise childhood as a distinctive phase are proclaimed
untenable, not only because of historical evidence which shows that most
societies have held different expectations of behaviour for children com-
pared to adults, but also because biological processes have demanded that
this be the case. Exploring how the biological and developmental aspects
of growing up have impacted on social and cultural processes has become
increasingly important to discussions of how we assess and define child-
hood and account for variation.
As with studies of emotion, however, recognising that biology does not
necessarily determine what it means to be a child has been decisive to the
field. When childhood begins and ends, and what is expected from children
in terms of education, work, and even emotional responses to different
situations have varied enormously, sometimes even within the same cul-
ture, depending on class, gender, and circumstance. As several chapters in
this volume suggest, how childhood was understood, and its application
to different groups of children, often affected what it was held children
should be taught about death. Expectations of their capacity to process this
information and emote in what was considered appropriate ways have simi-
larly varied across time.33 Poor children have been particularly vulnerable
8 K. BARCLAY AND K. REYNOLDS

to assumptions that they ‘mature’ more quickly than their wealthier coun-
terparts, excusing their engagement in work in the early modern period or
sexual activities in the nineteenth century.34 Part of what is under question
here is not only different understandings of how children should emote,
but different understandings of the biological capacity of children of par-
ticular chronological ages across time. This is not to suggest that some cul-
tures have been naïve or wrongheaded in their approach to child-­rearing;
but that, to a large extent, children have always needed to have consider-
able capacity to adapt to cultural expectation. The relationship between the
body and society, therefore, is complex and multi-layered and childhood, as
a phase when aspects of biology set it apart, constitutes a unique opportu-
nity to explore this relationship.
Recognising that, at least in the temporal and geographical contexts
of medieval and early modern Europe that fall under the domain of this
book, childhood was understood as a distinct period (if one that varied
across time and place) has also required historians to take the concept of
childhood seriously and to place children, as well as their intersections with
other parts of their identity such as class, gender, and religion, at the heart
of these discussions. As a number of studies have demonstrated, ‘child-
hood’, as a period imagined by adults as well as children, has often carried
considerable cultural weight.35 While debates around the ‘invention’ of
childhood have tended to focus on the period from the mid-­eighteenth
century, explorations of the concept of childhood as part of larger life-cycle
models have illustrated the ways that children act as an important referent
in many cultures’ understandings of themselves—childhood becomes a
discursive construct that helps adults and children understand themselves
and society as well as the child.36 As Lynch in Chap. 2 and Broomhall in
Chap. 4 demonstrate in this book, narratives of the lives of children help
communities situate themselves, their values and identities. Yet, that chil-
dren are marked as distinct also reminds us that their experiences are likely
to be unique and worthy of study.
As such, placing the child and the voices of children at the heart of
childhood studies is increasingly important, as we attempt to explore how
age impacts on how people engage with, process and construct them-
selves and the world around them. For historians, who often rely on
­sophisticated cultural forms such as writing or art, the voices of children
themselves can be difficult to access. Almost all the authors in this volume,
however, seek to address this issue, imaginatively engaging with historical
evidence to reconstruct the experiences of children and their emotions in
 INTRODUCTION: SMALL GRAVES 9

relation to the death of themselves or others. Reading against the grain

has long been posited for social historians and here we see authors such
as Newton, in Chap. 5, and Barclay, in Chap. 9, using parents’ accounts
to access the children they describe, while Maddern, in Chap. 3, looks at
how medieval saints’ lives describe children’s responses to death in their
accounts of miracles. Others, such as Colding-Smith in Chap. 11, think
about the child as a reader, using literature to reconstruct the emotions
expected by the text and to extrapolate the implications for typical chil-
dren. As texts that teach children how to interpret and respond to death,
including providing them with models for feeling, and that we can assume
that at least some children would draw on such resources in articulating
and performing their own emotions, works written for children can pro-
vide key insights into the sensibilities of the child reader. This refocusing
on the voice of the child is reflective of a new confidence in childhood
studies that children’s voices are not lost to historians if we imaginatively
engage with historical sources, and this collection both adds to the work
in this embryonic field and provides models for performing similar work
elsewhere.
In bringing together the history of emotions with childhood studies,
this volume highlights how emotion studies help scholars to ‘construct’
the child and children’s place within the family and society during the long
early modern period in Europe.37 Emotions play a central role in shap-
ing the community, with feelings used to mark its boundaries.38 As Karen
Vallgårda et al. (2015) note, children who are subject to both ‘emotional
formations’, the process of learning the patterns and practices of feeling,
and to ‘emotional frontiers’, where groups with different emotional norms
and values meet, contest, and overlap, are often useful subjects through
which to explore the making of community.39 It is through processes of
education that the values, behaviours, and feelings of emotional commu-
nities are often most clearly articulated, while the special positioning of
children in many communities provides key insights into their make-up
and relationships. Children are often emotionally fraught subjects, inspir-
ing communities to feel and behave in particular ways. Through charting
how people, including children, responded to child death across time, it is
possible to build a picture of the spaces of children in early modern societ-
ies and conversely to explore how children help shape their ­communities
through their presence, emotions, and behaviours. By focusing this discus-
sion on the single theme of child death, this collection provides an oppor-
tunity for an explicit study of continuity and change over time.
10 K. BARCLAY AND K. REYNOLDS

The chapters that follow range across a long early modern period and
make it possible to track a remarkable set of continuities over the centuries,
including the belief that childhood was a distinct period of life; the impor-
tance of care and affection when raising children, and the expectation that
parents would grieve their loss. Yet, within this framework, understandings
of the nature and duration of childhood, appropriate grief responses and
displays from both adults and children, and the nature of care and affec-
tion, were contested and underwent change. Moreover, even at a single
historical point, reactions to child death could be complex and conflicted
as parents and communities tried to reconcile feeling with economic and
social interests, religious orthodoxy and consolations, doubts, and com-
peting models for grieving. These debates were informed by changing
religious practices, new medicines, new literatures, and new values. Using
a wide-range of sources—including portraiture, literature for children and
adults, letters, diaries, and medical and institutional records, and drawing
on the work of scholars from across disciplines, including family history,
English literature, art history, and childhood studies, this chronologically
structured work allows readers to trace these debates over time.

Death, Emotion and Childhood in North-West

Europe
Small Graves ranges from the late medieval period to the mid-nineteenth
century—a long early modern period—with a focus on north-west Europe,
providing coverage of a group of nations representing most of the major
theological divisions in the Post-Reformation period, but also a region
where the Reformation was perhaps more significant in disrupting the
daily lives of families and communities than for their Southern neighbours,
and where Catholic and Protestant communities often lived alongside
each other. Despite the nuances of different faiths, as these essays show,
there are some remarkable continuities in how these nations responded
to, evaluated, and gave meaning to the deaths of children. Children were
placed at the heart of many of these communities, both as key to fam-
ily lineages and identity, and to communities’ investments in their future
selves. They shared a desire to see their children saved and refracted their
emotional responses to child death through a religious framing. They also
often shared literatures featuring pious children that provided models for
children when dying. In many respects, these are also similarities that can
be traced into Southern Europe, where commemorative practices around
 INTRODUCTION: SMALL GRAVES 11

child death were often not very different.40 Yet variation can be teased out,
with parents framing their anxieties around child care and death along dis-
tinct theological lines, in the emphasis communities placed on particular
motifs or themes in their reflections on child death, and in how children
were situated within the community. Tracking these differences across
and into Southern and Eastern Europe would be a fruitful area of future
research.
North-west Europe is also a region, with perhaps an exception for some
of Scandinavia, where there is an established literature on death, family
life, and increasingly childhood.41 Such histories have often acknowledged
the significance of child death in such communities, not least because of
significant child mortality across the period. Rates vary enormously across
time, region, and social group, but losing one in every four or five children
in the first year of life was fairly typical. When aggregated across time and
space, around one child in two failed to make it to the age of ten in early
modern Europe.42 At particular moments, during failed harvests or out-
breaks of disease, death rates could soar and, despite various medical and
social interventions, infant and child mortality remained high until the
beginning of the twentieth century.43 Yet, despite this acknowledgement,
studies of child death have tended to sit on the periphery of scholarship,
an interesting note in larger discussions of family relationships, grieving
practices, or the history of the child. Placing child death at the heart of
research and using it as the key lens through which to explore bigger ques-
tions around death, emotion, identity, and family is unusual.
A study of death in early modern, north-west Europe cannot be untan-
gled from the religious context that gave both life and death meaning
during the period. Until the eighteenth century, and for most people con-
siderably beyond this date, belief in God and an afterlife underpinned death
and people’s emotional responses to it. As noted above, perhaps the big-
gest impact on grieving practices during this period was the Reformation,
which fundamentally transformed understandings of the afterlife, as well
as appropriate funerary rituals and emotional responses to death. A num-
ber of authors have noted the distinct ways that this transformation played
out across Europe; others have looked at the way responses to child death
were shaped by the increasingly fractured religious context associated with
the growing number of Christian sects, each with their own particular
interpretation of Christian creed.44 Most sects agreed that all people were
born with the taint of original sin that required Christ’s sacrifice to ensure
salvation in the next life, but what role it played within childhood was
12 K. BARCLAY AND K. REYNOLDS

more complex. The medieval church held that if infants were baptised and
their original sin washed away, until they were old enough to commit per-
sonal sin (usually thought to be around the age of seven), they would go
to heaven. Unbaptised infants were a theological problem, finally resolved
in popular belief through limbo, where infants awaited God’s mercy.
Such ideas continued amongst the laity in the reformed Catholic Church,
while some Catholics also emphasised the significance of God’s mercy as
enabling children’s progress into heaven.
The idea of limbo, and similar concepts such as purgatory, were rejected
by most Protestant sects, leaving infant death as an ongoing and often
thorny topic of debate. As various chapters in this volume illustrate, this
was resolved in different ways. Some sects believed that all infants went to
heaven before they committed personal sin; others believed baptism was
necessary, and that unbaptised children were damned; some that children’s
salvation was inherited through their parents until the age of responsi-
bility.45 In Chap. 10, Løkke demonstrates that in some places, such as
late-eighteenth-century Lutheran Denmark, theology evolved to reflect a
growing demand for the salvation of infants—a shift in religious belief to
reflect popular emotional needs. Children were not passive in such reli-
gious controversies, with their deaths and their responses to death actively
informing ongoing debates, not least as the deathbed could provide an
opportunity for God to work through children. As Ryrie, in Chap. 6, and
Barclay, in Chap. 9, suggest, these beliefs shaped how people responded
to infant and child death, whether they felt anxiety and despair or hope
and joy. Yet this perhaps should not be overstated. As Broomhall shows
in Chap. 4 on sixteenth-century France, the theological distinctions on
questions of child salvation often had few practical repercussions for how
institutions and communities responded to child death, even as institu-
tions moved between Catholic and Huguenot hands.
Across most of Western Europe, a ‘good death’ provided reassuring
evidence of the existence of heaven and that the deceased was destined to
join other loved ones there.46 The ‘good death’ was marked in emotional
terms, with the dying person being reconciled to the end of her or his life
and, ideally, looking to death with peace or even joy. It was marked by a
calm demeanour, reflections on God, and the ability to offer pious advice
to those remaining. It was a death that comforted those left behind. A
good death was not beyond a child’s capacity. As Lynch, in Chap. 2, and
Maddern, in Chap. 3, observe for the medieval period, the ability of God
actively to intervene in the lives of children provided space within earlier
 INTRODUCTION: SMALL GRAVES 13

communities to imagine children as precociously exceeding the bound-

aries of youth. Sitting on the periphery of death and the afterlife acted to
give dying children knowledge and experiences that were beyond those
around them. The working of God could be actively shown in the emo-
tional demeanour of children, allowing them to display peace under con-
siderable pain and distress, and joy at what awaited. For children at the
heart of miracle stories, it was also marked in the transformation of the
body into a beautiful state, with old injuries and scars removed. Here the
association between innocence and beauty was highlighted, with broader
repercussions for understandings of young children, whose bodies were
not yet marked by disease or injury, tying them to a model of Godly
innocence that located children as distinct from adults. While the asso-
ciation of childhood purity with godliness declined over the centuries,
innocence remained an important idea associated with children in later
eras, locating them in need of special protection and care.
The ability of God to work in the lives of children in the post-­Reformation
period remained an important idea, particularly for those who displayed
spiritual gifts such as prophecy or preaching.47 Yet, dying a good death
was no longer a marker of precocious spirituality, but something that all
children could aspire to. As Barclay, in Chap. 9, and Colding-Smith, in
Chap. 11, illustrate, post-Reformation children were provided with models
of appropriate ways of dying in their childhood reading, as well as in more
formal encounters with the theology underpinning them in sermons, the
catechism, and through their parents’ teaching. Colding-Smith describes
how the saintly child in traditional religious depictions of child death sat
uneasily within early nineteenth-century literature, with young children
increasingly depicted as more playful and as having limited ability to truly
comprehend death’s nature. Newton goes further in Chap. 5, showing that
the realities of dying—when death was caused by painful and disfiguring
diseases or accidents, for instance—sometimes did not allow children to
achieve this model, even if they had been trained to strive for it.
While religion remained a dominant theme across the period covered
by this volume, as Broomhall in Chap. 4 and Walker in Chap. 8 note, anxi-
eties and care for children and the desire to protect them from harm were
not only motivated by concerns for their soul. Even very poor children,
who were often disconnected from familial networks, could be viewed as
important parts of community life, and their survival as something to be
desired and sought. Such markers of care were observed not only in pro-
tective legislation such as infanticide Acts, but in the textual care found in
Another random document with
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 “Not ourselves, or the house either,” he replied. “You see here is
not enough to do any great mischief;—only enough to bring down
the ceiling upon my wine-casks, and spoil the wine. There are no
buildings over this cellar, you know; so there is no danger to human
life.”
He then explained that, finding how invariably the worst excesses
of the mob were to be traced to their being plied with drink, it had
occurred to him to engage all the wine-merchants of Paris in an
agreement to refuse, on some pretence or other, to sell wine or
spirits to any but private gentlemen who wanted it for their own
consumption. Some agreed, and others did not; and these latter,
when they had sold all their stock, and could, from the scarcity, get
no more, had maliciously whispered in the mobs the secret with
which they had been entrusted. One after another of the merchants,
knowing the danger to which they were exposed, had fallen off from
the agreement; and Charles, whose stock was the largest now
remaining in the city, was left almost alone in his determination to
refuse the means of intoxicating the mob. He was aware that his
wine was longed for, and his life threatened. He could not remove his
stock to a distance, for his premises were evidently watched by
spies. He had reason to believe that, on the first occasion when the
people were to be excited to an extraordinary act of violence, they
were to be brought hither to burst open his stores, and be plied with
brandy and wine. He did not choose to be thus made the means of
promoting riot and murder, and determined on blowing up his stock,
if matters came to extremity. On the first alarm of the approach of a
mob, he should fire the train, and bring down the roof; making a pit of
what was now level ground. Or, if he should be absent, Pierre knew
how to do it.
“But how?” asked Marguerite, with as much voice as she had left.
“Must it not be fatal to the one who fires?”
“I trust not,” he replied; “though, if it were, my purpose would
stand. It is better to sacrifice one life thus, than to make murderous
fiends of many thousands. But, look here, this is our contrivance.”
And he showed her how a very small trap-door had been made of
one of the stones in the pavement above, through which a light might
be let down immediately upon the train, and from any distance, if the
line were of sufficient length.
“It is but little that a quiet citizen can do in times when men of a
different make are sure to gain the ascendency,” observed Charles:
“but no one is absolved from doing what he can. I am no orator to
rouse the people to patriotism, or to soothe their madness; but here I
have power in having something like a monopoly of the poison which
helps to madden them; and it shall be kept from inflaming their
brains, whether they tear me limb from limb, or compel me to drown
myself in my own wine, or let me live till the days when they shall
thank me for crossing their will.”
Marguerite’s terror was aggravated by a sense of shame for
having failed to anticipate her husband’s heroism, and being now
unable to share it. Her thoughts were ready to veer any way in hope
of escape, rather than anchor themselves upon her husband’s
determination, and await the event. No wonder, since she had so
much at stake, and was a very simpleton in political matters. She
had all possible fears, and no wishes. A miserable state to be in, in
such times!
Could not the whole family remove? Could not her husband, at
least, slip away by night? Must they remain in the neighbourhood of
gunpowder, and in daily expectation of the mob?—actually within
hearing of the hated drums?
They must; her husband replied. Any attempt to fly, or to alter their
manner of living, would be immediately detected, and would bring a
worse destruction than that which they might possibly escape by
remaining. Had not Marguerite observed spies about the house?
O yes: every day since poor Joli was found hanged. That was a
sad piece of carelessness. Charles thought so too, and even with
more reason than his wife. He knew that the dressing up of that dog
was set down in the list of his sins against his country. If it had taken
place eighteen months later, it would have brought upon him an
immediate sentence of death: but matters not having yet gone so far
as they were destined to proceed, the fact was only recorded against
him.
“Let us go,” said Marguerite, faintly, when she found her husband
bent on adhering to his plans, for reasons which she could not
gainsay. “I cannot bear the air of this place.”
“We will go presently, love,” replied Charles. “The first moment that
I see you look like yourself, I will call to Pierre to unlock the door.
Meanwhile, here is a seat; and I will give you air and something to
revive you.”
Having seated her where a breath of fresh air from the little trap-
door might blow upon her face, he brought a flask of rich wine, in a
full glass of which he pledged her, assuring her, with a smile, that it
did not yet taste of gunpowder. His pledge was,—
“Marguerite, my wife,—life and safety to ourselves and our
household! If not these,—at least the peace of our enlightened and
steadfast will!—Will you not pledge me?”
She bowed her head upon his shoulder, and wept her shame at
being unworthy of him,—unfit to live in such times.
“Then preserve yourself, love, to live in better times. They will
come; they must come; and steady hopefulness will be our best
security till they arrive.”
Marguerite so far succeeded in her endeavour to adopt her
husband’s principle, that she returned with a smile the searching
gaze which Pierre fixed upon her as she issued from the cellar: but
her countenance fell at the first words with which he answered her
intimation that she now knew the great secret, and would guard it
carefully.
“Alas! Madame. I fear it has ceased to be a secret——That is,” he
added, changing his tone when he perceived her alarm,—“our men
yonder cannot but observe how carefully we keep the place locked,
and how many customers we send away; and nothing escapes
suspicion in these times. But your having been down is a happy
circumstance, Madame; especially as you emerge with an air so
charmingly serene.”
This hint to look composed was not lost upon the lady, who tripped
across the court with a demeanour of assumed gaiety. It presently
vanished; and she looked with astonishment on her husband when
at play with the children after dinner. It rent her heart to hear her
father inquire perpetually how early in the spring they should set out
for Guienne, that he might delight himself in his beloved olive-groves
once more, with the children by his side: but Charles answered as if
there had still been olive-groves; and as if the family were at liberty
to go whither they pleased in their beautiful country. When, at
intervals, she saw him whipping his little girl’s wooden horse, and
practising battledore with his young son, laughing all the while as
merrily as either, she could scarcely believe him to be the same who
had so lately solemnly pledged her over a train of gunpowder laid by
his own resolute hands.
 Chapter IV.

DEEDS OF THE TIME.

M. Raucourt had abundance of leisure to repeat his question about

journeying southwards, and to describe to his grandchildren the
wealth of fruit-grounds that they would inherit from him. Month after
month, as the days grew longer, and the weather became hotter, he
told them that, when spring came, they should go with him to groves
where pink blossoms came out before the green leaves, and where
the young oranges grew more golden amidst the verdure as the
season drew on.
“But, grandpapa,” objected Julien, “the spring is going away very
fast already.”
“Ah! well, then, we shall be too late for the almond blossoms, but
the oranges and the grapes will be all the more beautiful.”
“But,” observed Pauline, when two more months had passed
away, “the vintage will be all over now before we can get there,
mamma says.”
“Well, my dear, but there is a spring every year, and I am talking of
next spring.”
And so the matter was settled for this year. Marguerite began to
hope that the affair of the cellars would be so likewise, as Charles
had of late been less importuned to sell, and there had been no fresh
evidences, amidst the increasing discontents of the people, that he
was held in suspicion. There was even a hope of removing a large
part of his stock openly and safely. Steele wanted more wine, and
Antoine, having none left at Bordeaux, referred him to his brother;
and the Englishman arrived in Paris to see whether he could enter
into another negociation with the house with which he had already
dealt so extensively. He took up his abode in Charles’s house, and
consulted with him, and also with some of the authorities of the city,
as to the best mode of removing his purchases, without exciting the
rage of the mob, who by this time had taken upon themselves to
decide the right and wrong of all matters that passed before their
eyes, whether of the nature of public or private business. The
magistrates, who politicly adopted the tone of the people as often as
they could, sighed over the anomaly of a foreigner purchasing wine
in Paris, while there was too little left for Frenchmen; and Steele
wondered as emphatically at the state of affairs which obliged two
merchants to call in the interference of the magistracy to repel that of
the mob, while they settled their private bargains. Marguerite thought
little of the one anomaly or the other, in her strong wish to have her
husband’s cellars emptied at all events. The greatest happiness she
could imagine was that of helping him and Pierre to sweep away the
gunpowder, and throw open the doors of the vacant place to any one
who chose to enter. There was much to be done, however, before
they could arrive at this fortunate issue.
One day, while Steele’s business was pending, a carriage drove
up to the door, with considerable state, and the Marquis de Thou,
having ascertained that the wine-merchant was at home, alighted,
and requested to speak with him on business. While Charles waited
on him, Marguerite anxiously inquired of Steele respecting the
marquis’s politics; for she apprehended a snare in every transaction.
She thought it strange that so stout an old royalist should have any
dealings with her husband, and was not comforted by what she
learned from Steele; namely, that being forced by the hatred of his
country neighbours to leave his chateau in Guienne, and take refuge
in Paris in the middle of summer, he seemed disposed to trim
between the two parties, and was therefore likely to be a dangerous
person to have dealings with. Immediately on his arrival, he had
contrived to place his daughter in the queen’s train, while he kept
upon terms with the duke of Orleans. Pleading to himself, and
bidding lady Alice plead to the queen, if called upon, his old
companionship with Orleans, he did much of the duke’s dirty work,
very unconsciously, very complacently, and with the comfortable
conviction that his loyalty remained unblemished, while he attended
no public meetings, and managed to be within the palace walls
whenever a popular movement was likely to take place. While Steele
was explaining what was reported of the marquis at Bordeaux,
Charles appeared.
 “The marquis wants to make large purchases of wine,” he said.
“Do you conceive he can have occasion for a fourth part of my stock
for his own use?”
“His chateau is shut up,” replied Steele; “and he is not occupying
his hotel in Paris. Depend upon it, he is shopping for Orleans, as
usual.”
“He shall not have enough to intoxicate a single bravo with,” cried
Charles. “Come with me, Steele, and find some objection to every
sample. Claim as much as you please, and disgust him with as much
more as you can.”
Pierre was called in to help, and among the three, all as solemn as
himself, the marquis was more eminently bamboozled than he had
ever been before in his life; which is saying a great deal. He
protested every sample to be better than the last, whatever might
have been mixed with it by Pierre in the fetching. He made half a
hundred low bows when Steele claimed all that was tolerable; and
declared his admiration of Charles’s magnanimity in pointing out the
defects of his own commodity. The civility of M. Pierre also in vowing
that the marquis should have no wine but the best, which was all,
unhappily, sold already, was worthy of much acknowledgment. Being
under promise, however, to purchase such and such quantities of
wine, he must waive their polite scruples, and obviate all others by
referring M. Charles Luyon to the most wealthy nobleman in the
kingdom for payment. This avowal decided the matter. Charles
shirked the marquis all the more speedily for his having owned that
he came from the Duke of Orleans, and the carriage conveyed away
the messenger without his errand.
From day to day other customers came: but, as all might be traced
as instruments of the duke, they were all dismissed in the same way
as the marquis. Charles was convinced that some popular
commotion was at hand. He perceived that the truly patriotic movers
in the revolution were more and more hated by Orleans, as his
purposes degenerated more and more from the purity of theirs; and
he could not restrain his indignation at the efforts that were made to
infatuate and brutalize the people, that they might disgrace or
interrupt the measures of the enlightened of their leaders, and bring
down a nation worthy of freedom to bow the knee to one who
nourished the passions of a tyrant in the coward heart of a slave. “He
shall not madden the people with my wine. Whatever they do shall
be done in a state of sanity, as far as I can contribute thereto,” was
still Charles’s resolution; and he declined prices on which the hand
of many a brother in trade would have closed without a question. He
had too humble an idea of his own consequence to adopt his wife’s
opinion that it was designed to attach him to the Orleans party by
making him the creditor of its chief. She was confirmed in her notion,
however, by a very disagreeable circumstance,—the appearance of
Orleans himself;—to purchase fruit, as he declared.
From fruit the negociation presently turned to wine, as Charles
expected; and for which he had prepared himself with a somewhat
desperate intent. Knowing the faint heart which his new customer hid
under his impudent address, he thought he might calculate on the
effect which would be produced by a sight of his underground
preparations; and he accordingly requested his Grace, with a
compliment to his well-known condescension, to enter the cellar. As
soon as they were fairly in, he called to Pierre to be very careful of
the lantern, as a single spark might be fatal; invited the duke, unless
he objected to approach so near to the magazine, to inspect the date
of a certain curious old wine; begged to go first among the fireworks
for fear of an accidental explosion, and so forth; expatiating con
amore on his commodity, in the intervals.
“Bless my soul, M. Luyon!” cried the duke, “what can you mean by
making a fortress of your cellars? It is dangerous to set foot in them,
by your own account.”
“Only to those who have no business here,” replied Charles. “My
man and I can tread in security.”
And he coolly gave his reasons for rendering his wine
inaccessible; pointing out no party, but merely with a reference to the
perpetual danger of disturbance in the present times.
“But it is absolutely a fortress,” repeated the duke. “Your door is
massive. Is there no way of escape?——I mean, no other entrance?”
“None whatever,” replied Charles; and at this moment, Pierre,
having set down the lantern, slammed the plated door, and barred
and crossbarred it with a diligence which the guest by no means
approved.
 “A fortress is perfectly harmless when in friendly hands, and
unless attacked,” observed Charles. “Here are no weapons of
offence, you observe; and it is far from being my interest to blow up
my stock, unless driven to it.”
“Or even then,” argued the duke. “Supposing your premises were
attacked,—an idle anticipation;—but supposing they were, it would
answer better to you to have them stripped than destroyed.”
“To my pocket, doubtless,” answered Charles, occupying himself
with opening a flask; “but not to my conscience. If by my means a
mob, or any individual of a mob, were to be incited to party violence,
—if I were so treacherous as to allow their impulses of patriotism to
be corrupted into licentiousness,—I should feel the manliness within
me melting away. I should start at shadows for the rest of my days.
No, sir; perish my possessions, rather than they should go to corrupt
public virtue.—Taste this, I advise you, my lord duke.”
“Do not you think the air rather close here?” asked Orleans, in his
smoothest manner. “Are not the fumes of this wine——”
“And of the gunpowder, my lord? They are no doubt oppressive to
those who are unused to them. Open the door, Pierre.”
The duke found his faculty of taste more to be relied upon in the
open air; and took his stand accordingly in the portal, where he stood
negociating and gossiping for an unconscionable time, till first one or
two people appeared in the court, then more, and more still, and in
an instant the well-known drum was heard close by, and the shouts
of a rabble which poured in without the slightest warning. Orleans
looked as if he was going to be very angry; but Charles had no time
to parley with his hypocrisy.
It was too late to fasten the portal on the outside, and run to the
house. Pierre’s motion was to pull the duke with them into the cellar;
but his master forbade. He thrust Orleans out of the portal, calling
out,
“See, we carry a light in with us; and remember you tread on
hollow ground,”—and retreated, not allowing even his faithful Pierre
to enter the place of danger with him. He locked, bolted, barred and
double barred the door, went and placed the lantern close by the
train, looked to his matches and tinder, and then sat down, with
folded arms, to await the issue of the expected siege. He was fully
resolved to sacrifice his life and property rather than be aiding and
abetting with Orleans in giving a licentious character to the great act
(whatever it might be) which the people were evidently
contemplating. The more he had thought of the events of the
preceding day, when arms had been seized and cannon laid hold of
by the people, the more convinced he had been that the present
would not pass away without being signalized by some extraordinary
deed, and the more resolutely determined he felt to use such power
as he had, for the safety and honour of the state. The fierce yells of
the mob outside had no effect but to increase his courage, as they
served to justify his object to himself; and as he looked through the
dim vault, from the further end of which came the dull echo of the
blows upon the door, as he observed that the one feeble light did not
so much as flicker in the socket while all was tumult outside, he felt a
thrilling consciousness of power which was not gloomy, though it
was fearful, and might involve his own destruction. Whether it would
involve any other life, he had considered much and long; he believed
not; or that if one or a few should be injured by the slight explosion
which would effect his purpose, this would be a less evil than would
be perpetrated by a drunken mob in possession of such means of
destruction as they had seized the day before.
One circumstance nearly unnerved him. He had prevented Pierre
from entering with him, under the idea of saving his life from the peril
in which his own was placed; but the sudden outcry which presently
arose, the oaths evidently directed at an individual, the cries of shrill
female voices,—“To the lamp-post with him!”—agonized Charles with
the idea that the vengeance of the mob for his opposition was to fall
upon his unfortunate servant. He felt a momentary impulse to throw
open the door and take all the consequences, the first of which
would undoubtedly be that he would be taken to the lamp-post,——
“Not instead of Pierre, but with him,” he thought, however, in
another moment. “No. I cannot save him; so I will persevere. And
may heaven hold me guiltless of his blood; for I meant well towards
him!—But what now?—What a silence!—Have they sent for fire to
smoke me out? I will throw up a thicker smoke presently, if that be it.
—O, what a horrible cry! What can have put them in a new rage?”
 If Charles could have looked through the thick walls of his vault, he
would have seen that which might well have called down an
immediate sentence of death on all his household; that which added
new horrors to his wife’s suspense, and increased the agony of poor
Pierre, standing as he was in the grasp of two of the enemy, and
assured by the fish-women about him that he was to be hanged as
soon as they could find a cord. He forgot his own situation for a
moment when he looked up to the balcony, and saw the deplorable
mistake which was likely to prove the destruction of the whole family.
Nobody within doors had thought of M. Raucourt, whom no event
was now ever known to bring from his easy chair at the front window.
He was left alone while the back of the house was being barricaded
with all speed, and messengers put out upon the roof to find their
way, if possible, to the authorities; or at least to make signals for
assistance. But the children came in a state of amazement to
grandpapa, and the shouts reached even his dull ear, and recalled
the associations which in the old royalist were always the first to be
awakened. He had no other idea than that the people were hailing
the royal family, and he resolved not to be behind others in his duty.
He sent Pauline for the white cockade he had given her, tottered to
his chamber, got out, under a new impulse of strength, upon the
balcony, and waved his white favour. It was this which had silenced
the mob with astonishment; and in the depth of this silence, the
feeble, cracked voice of the old man was heard trying to shout “Vive
le Roi!”
The horrible burst of passion which followed was not directed
against him. The helplessness of his attitude as he stood supporting
himself with both hands, and the gleam of foolish pleasure which
came over his countenance, showed his real state; and even the
lowest of the mob did not yet make war against dotards. It was
because his act was supposed to betoken the politics of the family
that it excited such an outcry; and there seemed some reason for
Pierre’s fears that the very house would be presently levelled with
the ground. It made his heart sick within him to see the old man
smiling and bowing, and trying to induce the shrinking children to
come and stand beside him, and resisting his wretched daughter’s
attempts to withdraw him. Pierre struggled fiercely, but in vain; he
implored, more humbly than he would have stooped to do for his
own life, to be allowed two minutes’ speech to the people. He met
only threats and laughter. The threats mattered little to a man who
expected to be hanged in a few minutes, but the laughter stung him
to the soul. He cursed himself for the folly of having appealed to
those who could mock the innocence of dotage and childhood, and
disregard the agony of a woman: and he recalled the words in which
he had at first spoken to them as the French people.
Pierre was right. These were no sample of the French people who
had begun to cast off the yoke of tyranny. These were a portion of
the brutalized class who, in using the word tyranny, thought only of
the difference between suffering and inflicting it: who, when they
talked of liberty, asked for license to plunder palaces and riot in wine-
cellars. These were, in short, the Orleans mob, and not the real
authors of the political changes now taking place. They aided these
changes at the time, indeed, by testifying to the degree of
oppression which the lower orders had till now suffered; and they
furnish, to this day and for ever, an instructive commentary upon
these changes, in as far as they exhibit the operation of despotism in
preparing its own downfall by at once brutalizing and exasperating its
victims. But still these were perfectly distinct from the true protectors
of liberty, the wise and steady opponents of despotism. These last
were very differently employed this morning, and tidings of their
doings came just in time to preserve Charles and his family.
The children had already been sent away by the roof, in charge of
the servants, and Marguerite had sat down alone beside the chair of
her father, (whom it was impossible to remove, and whom she would
not leave,) when sounds reached her which gave her back a little of
the hope she had wholly surrendered. It was not the approach of
soldiers, nor the potential voices of magistrates, nor any of the
welcome intimations of help at hand which conclude a riot and
disperse a rabble in an orderly country, and under ordinary
circumstances. Neither soldiers nor magistrates could be depended
upon, or had any power in Paris at this time but that which the
outrageous mob chose to allow them. Marguerite knew this so well,
that, though she took all precautions in sending for aid, she expected
none but that which might arise from accident. Such a diversion of
the people’s rage as actually happened was beyond her hopes.
While her father was still talking about the king, and she was
holding him down in his chair, in opposition to his complaints of not
being allowed to go to the window to pay his duty, the fearful sound
of the tocsin was heard above all the uproar in the court and street.
One cry seemed to come on the four winds,—“To the Bastille! to the
Bastille!” At first confused and reiterated, the clangor and the shout
echoed noisily from street to street, from steeple to steeple.
Presently the cry became more concentrated, as if the city sent up
but one mighty voice. Marguerite sank down on her knees,
overcome with the hope of deliverance for her husband; but the mob
did not yet cease to batter the door which shielded him, and the
fierce women cried out that they would not be decoyed away by a
false alarm. After a few more moments came the booming of cannon
on the ear, and a pause followed in the court. Again it came, and
again, and the windows rattled, and there was in the intervals quiet
enough for the rushing of a steady stream of people to be heard from
the streets, from whom arose, in alternation with silence, the deep
and steady cry, “To the Bastille!” The mob in the court mixed with this
stream, eager to learn what new scene was to be enacted, what
better hope of plunder was presented than that afforded by the
stores of an obstinate and insignificant wine-merchant, who had
already caused them more trouble than he and his goods were
worth. They looked round for a signal from their leader, but Orleans
had disappeared some time before, not choosing to be held
responsible for the violence to which he had tempted his followers.
They went to look for him at the Bastille, where he was indeed
present, to help, as usual, to disgrace a work set on foot by better
men.
As soon as the court was empty, Marguerite flew to release her
husband. Charles was listening intently to ascertain whether this
hush was a treacherous calm, or whether he was indeed safe for the
present, when he felt a breath of fresh air, and saw a glimmer of
daylight fall into the midst of the vault, and heard a faint voice calling
to him,—
“Come out, love! If you are safe, all is safe.”
 Not all, Charles remembered, when he had time to think of any
one but his wife. Before he even went to seek his children, and to
recall the servants, he ascertained that Pierre had disappeared, and
hurried out to learn his fate, bending his steps to the Place de Grêve,
where he feared he was most likely to find his faithful servant, dead
or alive. He found two bodies hanging, and cries of murderous
exultation, which made his blood run cold, still echoing through the
place; but Pierre was nowhere to be seen, and the bodies were
those of soldiers. He saw more victims brought to the foot of the
lamp-posts; but they came from the direction of the Bastille, and
were evidently members of the invalid garrison. Through some
unseen influence exerted in the crowd, these men were spared,
which gave Charles the hope that Pierre, if yet living, would escape.
In fact, he was safe enough, being at this moment employed in
drawing the people to the attack upon that gloomy fortress, which
was regarded with more detestation by Frenchmen than if it had
been a pest-house. When Pierre had by his energy sufficiently
attested his good citizenship to be allowed to depart whither he
would, he ran homewards, met his master in search of him,
embraced the children, kissed Marguerite’s hand, and hastened
back again to assist the siege, as if nothing had happened to himself
that morning. Charles did the same, having persuaded his wife that
he should be safer before the Bastille than at home, and left her in
the protection of Steele, who had returned from his fruitless errand to
the magistrates; fruitless, because they could listen to no petitions
for private succour while the grand work of the demolition of the
state-fortress was going on under their sanction, and the control of
their forces.
Steele had no more idea of remaining with the women and
children on such an occasion, than his friend Charles. As soon as he
had persuaded Marguerite to lie down, and had seen grandpapa and
the children at play together again, and called in two stout porters of
the establishment to keep watch below, he also disappeared. Often
and vehemently did he protest in after years that he would not for
any consideration have been absent from that siege; and of all his
possessions, none were so valued by him as a link of the chain from
which one of the captives had been released by Steele’s own hands;
which link the Englishman carried about him to the day of his death.
While Marguerite slept, through pure exhaustion, occasionally
starting at the sound of cannon, or scared with visions of the horrible
faces she had seen in the court so lately, her husband was actively
disproving, to as many as might observe him, his being a royalist. He
lent a helping hand to one work after another; now assisting in letting
down the drawbridges successively; now in hauling forward the
cannon; now in demolishing the guard-houses; now in forcing an
entrance into the gloomy place itself; and finally, shouting for the
release of the prisoners. Everything was forgotten but the work
before his eyes: hours flew like minutes, amidst the intenseness of
the occupation; and yet, if his thoughts reverted for a moment to the
events of the morning, they seemed of ancient date,—as if he had
lived a lifetime in this one day.
The spectacles of a lifetime were indeed to be beheld within the
compass of this one scene. The most vivid emotions to which all
ranks and all ages are subject were here in full play: all the various
grouping which life affords was here presented; the entire elements
of the scenery of human character were here congregated in infinite
and magnificent combinations. The appeals to eye and ear alone
were of unprecedented force; those addressed to the spirit equalled
in stimulus the devotion of Leonidas in his defile, and excelled in
pathos the meditation of Marius among more extensive ruins than
those which were now tumbling around. From the heights of the
fortress might be seen a heaving ocean of upturned faces, when the
breeze dispersed at intervals the clouds of smoke which veiled the
sun, and gave a dun and murky hue to whatever lay beneath. If a
flood of sunshine now and then poured in to make a hundred
thousand weapons glitter over the heads of the crowd, the black row
of cannon belched forth their red fires to extinguish the purer light.
The foremost of the people, with glaring eyes, and blackened and
grinning faces, looked scarcely human, in their excess of eagerness,
activity, and strength. Yet more terrific were the sounds: the clang of
the tocsin at regular intervals, the shouts of the besiegers, the
shrieks of the wounded, the roar of the fire which was consuming the
guard-houses, the crash of the ruins falling on all sides, a heavy
splash in the moat from time to time, as some one was toppled from
the ramparts to be smothered in its mud,—and above all these, the
triumphant cries of victory and liberty achieved,—these were enough
to dizzy weak brains, and give inspiration to strong ones. Here were
also the terrors which sooner or later chill the marrow of despotism,
and the stern joy with which its retribution fires the heart of the
patriot. Here were the servants of tyranny quailing before the glance
of the people; kneeling soldiers craving mercy of mechanics, of
women, of some of every class whom, in the execution of their
fancied duty, they had outraged. Here were men shrinking from
violence with a craven horror, and women driven by a sense of
wrong to show how disgusting physical courage may be made. Here
were also sons led on to the attack by their hitherto anxious fathers;
husbands thrust forward into danger by their wives; and little children
upreared by their mothers amidst the fire and smoke, to take one last
look of the hated edifice which was soon to be levelled with the
ground. The towers of palaces might be seen afar, where princes
were quaking at this final assurance of the downfall of their despotic
sway, knowing that the assumed sanctity of royalty was being wafted
away with every puff of smoke which spread itself over the sky, and
their irresponsibility melting in fires lighted by the hands which they
had vainly attempted to fetter, and blown by the breath which they
had imagined they could stifle. They had denied the birth of that
liberty whose baptism in fire and in blood was now being celebrated
in a many-voiced chaunt with which the earth should ring for
centuries. Some from other lands were already present to hear and
join in it; some free Britons to aid, some wondering slaves of other
despots to slink homewards with whispered tidings of its import; for
from that day to this, the history of the fall of the Bastille has been
told as a secret in the vineyards of Portugal, and among the groves
of Spain, and in the patriotic conclaves of the youth of Italy, while it
has been loudly and joyfully proclaimed from one end to the other of
Great Britain, till her lisping children are familiar with the tale.
The congregation would not have been complete without the
presence of another class of witnesses whose very existence will
perhaps be matter of incredulity in some future age of the world;—
that class which man has taken upon himself to institute, and which
will one day rise up against him in judgment of his abused power.
There were captives present in this scene of lawless freedom,—or
rather of freedom above the law. They were there, first trembling
before the assailants, and then marvelling at the treatment they
received, as the kid would marvel at being dandled by the lion. So it
appeared to be with most of them, while one or two caught the tone
of popular triumph before the doors of their cells were opened, and
others received their deliverance in a manner that rent the heart of
the deliverers.
When the capture of the place was complete, and its defenders
had been carried off, some to be sacrificed for the sins of the
government, and others to meet with mercy, Charles pressed
forward, with a multitude of companions, to release the captives. It
was hard labour to pull the clenched doors from their staples and
hinges; and in some cases it was found easier to effect the work in a
yet more irregular manner: as in one to which Steele called Charles’s
attention when they accidentally met in the centre of the fortress,
where the light of day, however, streamed upon them through the
demolished roof. Steele’s face was working in strong emotion, and
he appeared speechless while he seized his friend by the arm, and
drew him to gaze on what made his heart’s blood boil. Steele pointed
through a breach in the enormous wall, whose thickness shut out all
sound from the inmate of the dungeon it inclosed; and there, with
eyes drooped before the unwonted light,—a light which, however,
only half displayed the squalid sickliness of his countenance, sat one
who seemed to take no heed of any human presence. His expanded
nostrils and half-opened mouth seemed to betoken that there had
been passion and expectation within him; but the apathy and
despondency of his attitude exhibited a strange contradiction to
these evidences. When the first face appeared through the opening,
he fumbled uneasily with his hands in his coarse dungeon dress; and
when he was hailed, more and more loudly, under the idea that he
was deaf, his beard was seen to stir upon his breast, and his lips to
move, as if he was attempting in vain to articulate a sound. The
endeavour presently ceased, though voice after voice was heard in
importunity,—sometimes endearing, sometimes rallying,—that he
would rise and help to free himself. It was a work of time to make a
breach large enough to admit his deliverers; and at last, just before
the first of them clambered in, the captive uplifted his broken and
unmodulated voice in a few words, one or two of which Steele
recognized to be English.
“O! he is a Briton!” cried he, clenching his hands above his head in
the extremity of passion; and, staggering against the wall, he uttered
a deep curse on the tyranny by which a countryman had been
goaded into madness far from his own land, and from all who could
know or avenge his state. Again and again he looked; again and
again he withdrew, unable to bear the alternating aspects of idiotcy
and gibbering madness. At last, he made trial of a new kind of
stimulus; leaning through the breach, and calling to the captive,—
“O come, and take the hand of a brother once more! Look up, and
tell us that your deliverers are welcome! Let it be crime, or let it be
misery that has stricken you so deeply, the last day of your dungeon
life is over. Come, and hear about England! Come and feel the fresh
air——”
The prisoner here shivered, as if already chilled by the air of a
warm July day. Encouraged by this sign of attention, Steele went on.
“Only tell us whom you fear, and we will carry you far from them.
Only name those you love, and I will get you tidings of them. Come
and help us to free yourself and others; for you know more of the
secrets of this horrible place than we.”
He would not move, however; and when they got to him, they
found that he was chained by the middle to the wall behind him. It
was impossible to learn from him his name, alleged offence, or
period of imprisonment.
It was not till the Count de Solages was also liberated that it was
ascertained that his name was White; that he had been confined for
some unknown offence for many years in the castle of Vincennes,
whence he was removed, in company with the count, to the Bastille,
seven years before.
 Chapter V.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BARGAINING.

The people carried away all the prisoners on their shoulders,

intending to make them tell their stories in the coffee-houses of
Paris; but Steele could not bear to see his countryman,—such a
mere wreck of humanity as he was,—thus exhibited. He thankfully
accepted his friend Charles’s invitation to bring him first to his house,
and try whether the intellects of the sufferer could be restored by any
method of treatment—treatment which was more likely to be
efficacious if administered by one who could speak his own
language than by strangers. Fired as Steele had been in the
achievement of the great work of the day, he now left the completion
of it to others. While the mayor and executive were sending forth
their popular decrees,—while the king was informed for the first time
that his realm was in a state of revolution,—while the helpless
ministry looked in one another’s dismayed faces,—while the city
architects were employed under a regular commission to make a
perfect blank where the Bastille had stood, Steele was watching over
his released countryman, fondly hoping that he traced an hourly
growing resemblance to manhood, not only in external appearance,
but in thought and action. He tried to make him vary his posture, and
to walk;—an exercise to which he was as much averse as one who
has taken laudanum. The next thing was to induce him to speak,
which proved less difficult, provided he was permitted to mix up
French and English after his own fashion. There was sometimes
more and sometimes less sense in what he said, and it was
occasionally interrupted by fits of impotent passion, for which no
immediate cause could be assigned. These, however, came on only
after his new way of life had continued for some time, and were
indeed stages in the growth of the unmanageable madness which
sent him, after all remedial means had been tried, to end his days in
the lunatic asylum at Charenton.
 Before these had become terrifying to Charles’s children, they did
not shrink from talking to him, and were encouraged to do so, as he
spoke more, and more sensibly to them than to any one else.
“Why are you so very fond of water, I wonder?” exclaimed Julien,
one day, laughing, when White held out his hand to snatch some
which looked cool and clear in the boy’s hand. “O yes, you may have
it. I can get plenty more. Why do you want so much water?”
“I drink water. And my rat—Where is my rat?”
None of the family could make out why he looked about him for a
rat: but Steele’s conjecture was that such an animal might have
found its way out of the moat of the prison into the cell where no
other living thing could enter but the silent turnkey. On inquiry, this
was found to be the case; and the circumstances were touching in
the extreme to those who had never known what it was to want such
a resource. It was observed that White was as greedy of bread as of
water, though not always for the purpose of eating it. Nothing could
tempt him from it when there was any in the room; and whatever was
offered in exchange for a crust, however delicate to the taste, or
glittering to the eye, was rejected. “Bread, bread. Water, water,” was
for ever his cry.
“He likes to play on my bird-organ,” observed Julien, “and I told
him he might keep it: but he thrust it back upon me for a piece of
bread. He sold it much cheaper, papa,—for far less bread,—than the
people that made it. I think that is very silly.”
“It depends upon the value he puts upon what he has in
exchange,” answered papa.
“Well, you told me how much bread was worth this organ; and it
was much more than I gave him.”
“Yes; but you might happen to be shut up, as he has been, where
one loaf of bread would be more useful to you than ten such at
home.”
“Why more useful? I can but eat bread anywhere.”
“Yes; you can give it away,” interposed mamma. “If you were shut
up for several years in a silent and nearly dark place, where nobody
ever came to you, and were to hear a noise one day, and to see
something moving, and to find out that it was a rat which had made
its way to your cell; and if you wished that the rat should come again,